Posts made by Sammi

That sounds intriguing. It might make Scion less of a Legend-measuring contest.

I'm hyped for Hellblade, an action adventure game from the perspective of a Celtic warrior dealing with anxiety and hallucinations following some unrevealed traumatic experience. The developers are talking up the idea that it's going to be a very empathic portrayal of mental illness, while also being an adventure game where the person with the delusions and periods of crippling weakness still gets to be a badass. Oh, and the art they've shown so far is fucking gorgeous.

@tragedyjones said:

I played so, so much Aberrant in the early 21st century.

TIL that it's after 2050. What rock have I been hiding under?

I used Atlantis for a solid period of time and even though I'm not a Mac user these days, I would contribute to a Help @Sparks Finish 2.0 fund on account of all the use I got out of it.

@Roz I can tell. It would definitely save the effort of having to (occasionally, but repeatedly) explain why the fact that line 32 looks different from every other line has told the computer to display things differently. I enjoy helping people, but when the non-techie has a "what is this sorcery" response to something that I see as a simple and abundantly obvious pattern, it causes unnecessary stress.

@Bobotron said:

ETA: Here's a question. Can you get it to make other stuff display if the content is not filled? For example, if I have a header for RP Hooks and the hooks section is empty, I want RP Hooks to not display.

Yes. You can see an example of that in the TR log template where the subtitle section disappears if there's no content. If there is content, it prints a table row and cell for the subtitle. Otherwise, nothing. The key is that you need to design a table that looks alright if whatever field doesn't exist.

@Roz I'm definitely using that next time I set up a new wiki and have a couple of days to dig through syntax.

What is this sorcery? Wiki templates that don't require extensive beatings scientific experimentation to get to cooperate with DPL and can fetch whatever data you want?

All of my wiki know-how has been violently self-taught in manipulating and maintaining code from HM. DPL works great, most of the time, but getting it to behave like I did on The Reach was extremely painful. From looking at SMW, it seems like it can potentially do more and with less headache. I approve.

@Bobotron Yeah, easily. It looks atrocious in the code, and it gets worse the more conditions you want to add, but if you have a good text editor with bracket matching, it's easy enough to write. You just need the ParserFunctions extension (see your Special:Version page). You set up your template as normal, but you wrap your include statement in an #if tag.

If you have people writing content directly into their template:

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} |  {{{contacts}}} }}

That will check the contacts parameter for text. If it finds no such parameter, it will sub in a blank space (the default behavior is to print "{{{contacts}}}"). The #if statement checks the parameter for content, and if it finds anything other than a blank space, it will print the parameter.

If you have people making subpages and want to exclude subpages that don't exist:

{{#ifexist: Stacy/Contacts | {{:Stacy/Contacts}} | Stacy doesn't know anybody!}}

This will check for the existence of Stacy/Contacts, and print it if it exists. (I left the string in the "else" section for the sake of readability. It is by no means required, but it's harder to read a bunch of consecutive brackets and pipes.)

It sounds like you want to have pages able to be displayed or hidden. That's also doable.

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} | {{#ifexist: Stacy/Contacts | {{:Stacy/Contacts}} | Stacy doesn't know anybody!}} | Contacts hidden!}}

This will check to see if the contacts field is set to display. If so, it will then check for Stacy/Contacts, and display it if it's there. (I left the strings in for the sake of readability. They are by no means required, but it's harder to read a bunch of consecutive brackets and pipes.)

You'll want to finish it by making it so that it automatically subs in the character name for the page.

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} | {{#ifexist: {{{PAGENAME}}}/Contacts | {{:{{{PAGENAME}}}/Contacts}} | {{{PAGENAME}}} doesn't know anybody!}} | Contacts hidden!}}

The {{{PAGENAME}}} magic word returns the name of the page the template is on. However, it will return the full path for the name if it's on a subpage, so you might want to use {{{BASEPAGENAME}}} or {{{ROOTPAGENAME}}} for extra specificity.

If you want to make a table that changes based on which fields are filled out, that's another level of complexity. It's not hard, but it requires that you first build your skeleton and then go through and replace everything with code, because nobody who isn't a savant can just write that shit out. You can see an example of a table that morphs based on parameters here (the subtitle section disappears completely if it doesn't exist).

This is much belated, but I'm responding because @Quibbler mentioned me. I was Ebla. I did a lot of the wiki work for Darkwater and most of the setup for The Reach, based on dark powers obtained via blood sacrifice to the gods of MediaWiki and DPL (I stole shamelessly from what Loki set up on Haunted Memories and then broke things over and over again until I figured out how they worked).